[onion2k]

I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months.

Is it possible to differentiate between a bot, and a human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment where some of the content might be AI written but not all? I don't think it is.

[kdheiwns]

AI post "improvements" are the most annoying thing. I see more and more people doing it, especially when posting reviews/experiences with things, and they always get called out for it. They always justify it with "AI helped me organize what I wanted to say." Like man, you're having an AI write about an experience it didn't have and likely didn't even proofread it. Who knows what BS it added to the story. Even disorganized and misspelled stories are better than AI fantasy renditions that are 20 times longer than they need to be.

[yoyohello13]

I just assume if any comment sounds like an ad it's a bot. All the comments like "I'm 10x faster with Claude Opus 4.6!" or "Have you tried Codex with ChatGPT 5.X? What a time to be alive!" can be lumped in the bot bin.

[lm28469]

> HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months.

hm, the whole internet really, youtube, reddit, twitter, facebook, blog posts, food recipes, news articles, it's getting more and more obvious

[sunaookami]

I find the bigger problem with online comments are that people repeat the same comments and "jokes" over and over and over again. Sure we had those with YouTube 15 years ago when people always spammed "first!" and "who is listening in <year>?" but now it's gotten worse and every single comment is now just some meme (especially on Reddit) or some kind of "gotcha"...

[skeptic_ai]

All will be fixed with real id attestation /s

[e2le]

> human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment

I want to hear people in their own voice, their own ideas, with their own words. I have no interest in reading AI generated comments with the same prose, vocabulary, and grammar.

I don't care if your writing is bad.

Additionally, I am sceptical that using AI to write comments on your behalf creates opportunities for self-improvement. I suspect this is all leading to a death of diversity in writing where comments increasingly have an aura of sameness.

[esafak]

I was thinking of how to create a UX around quantifying or qualifying AI use. If products revealed that users had used in-app AI to compose their responses, they might respond by doing it outside the app and pasting it in. If you then labeled pasted text as AI they might use tools to imitate typing. And after all that, you might face a user backlash from the users who rely on AI to write.

[munk-a]

I don't personally care about the distinction especially since AI usually 'improves' things by making it more verbose. Don't waste tokens to force me to read more useless words about your position - just state it plainly.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

[homebrewer]

If you are suspicious, look at comment history. It's usually fairly obvious because all comments made by LLM spambots look the same, have very similar structure and length. Skim ten of them and it becomes pretty clear if the account is genuine.

I'm more worried about how many people reply to slop and start arguing with it (usually receiving no replies — the slop machine goes to the next thread instead) when they should be flagging and reporting it; this has changed in the last few months.

[taeric]

This makes me think a tool that lets me know how much of the engagement I was seeing was from bots would be huge.

[onion2k]

If you are suspicious, look at comment history.

I'm never suspicious though. One of the strange, and awesome, and incredibly rare things about HN is that I put basically zero stock in who wrote a comment. It's such a minimal part of the UI that it entirely passes me by most of the time. I love that about this site. I don't think I'm particularly unusual in that either; when someone shared a link about the top commenters recently there were quite a few comments about how people don't notice or how they don't recognize the people in the top ranks.

The consequence of this is that a bot could merrily post on here and I'd be absolutely fine not knowing or caring if it was a bot or not. I can judge the content of what the bot is posting and upvote/downvote accordingly. That, in my opinion, is exactly how the internet should work - judge the content of the post, not the character of the poster. If someone posts things I find insightful, interesting, or funny I'll upvote them. It has exactly zero value apart from maybe a little dopamine for a human, and actually zero for a robot, but it makes me feel nice about myself that I showed appreciation.